Friday, 28 February 2014

Jolla phone news: MWC2014 Overview

Jolla at Mobile World Congress 2014 - Short overview

Jolla Oy is a finnish mobile phone manufacturer. They introduced smartphone Jolla at Helsinki, Finland at November 27. 2013. Jolla is powered by new operating system Sailfish OS, also developed by Jolla Oy. This operating system is based on Meego, seen on Nokia's phone model N9.

Jolla Oy was present at Mobile World Congress 2014 with a 100 square meters booth at hall 1. Event took place at Barcelona, Spain at February 23. - 27. 2014.

Speeches and interviews

Marc Dillon, Co- founder and Head of Software at Jolla gave speeches and interviews during all 4 days of the event. Antti Saarnio, Chairman of the Jolla Board, was not seen at the booth but he was also interviewed and shared interesting news about Jolla's future. What we learned from these two:

Jolla has sold their first production batch almost in total (rumoured to be 50 000 phones)

Jolla is currently available for purchace at EU, Norway and Switzerland. Jolla is expanding theirs sales to India by September and Russia before that. Also China is planned for this year

The company was surprised by the interest towards Jolla brand. In advance they expected the Sailfish brand to have a bigger share at the event

Sailfish OS has reached a commercial stage. Beta sign is dropped in the beginning of March with the next Software update. New updates are still delivered to customers monthly

New phone model is planned to 2015

In overall, the company was very satisfied to the huge amount of interest towards their booth

Stefano Mosconi, CTO of Jolla, was also present and gave an interesting interview to telefonino.net. You can find this interview (n italian) here. An interview with Carol Chen, community chief at Jolla, can be found here. This one is in english, shared by Jolla Es.

New partnerships

Rovio, a finnish software company, presented a 3rd party The Other Half for Jolla with their Angry Birds content. The final product is excpected to be seen by the end of June.

Makia, a finnish clothing company, presented a 3rd party The Other Half for Jolla with their Makia content. The final product is excpected to be seen by the end of June.

Jolla co-operates with Tieto in sharing the Sailfish OS to other phone manufacturers. Jolla is interested to offer Sailfish OS as an option to all phone manufacturers developing phones with different platforms

Sailfish OS to Android devices

By June 2014 Jolla is introducing a launcer app for Android users, enabling Sailfish user experience for some Android devices. Which devices are supported remains yet unknown. As Sailfish OS is an OpenSource platform, the full operating system is excpected to be shared also, enabling installing it to other devices instead of their current OS. Jolla community has already begun with this, and Jolla OY introduced their operating system running on several devices during the event. At Jolla booth, Sailfish OS was seen on

Nexus 4

Galaxy S3 (i9305)

Xiaomi Mi2

Mediatek ZTE X950 (introduced on the 4th day)

Sailfish OS has been seen earlier on:

Nexus 7

Acer Iconia W500

Nokia N9

Nokia N950

Sony Xperia

HP Mini

O2 Joggler

PackardBell Butterfly Touch

Jolla Labs

Additional to Android devices, there were some very interesting 3rd party products introduced at Jolla Labs table:

Kimmo Lindholm's TOHOLED, representing an extra OLED screen on the back of Jolla, showing the time and notifications

Harware keyboard QWERTY TOH, representing The Other Half with a keyboard coming out of the phone.

RGB LED TOH by iProtoXi, representing a LED equipped back cover which changes the color of the LEDS by orientation of the phone, or by additional proximity sensor on the back cover

Jollagirls

The interesting products and software would not have gathered their well earned crowd without the great work by Jollagirls on the booth. Sailor outfits were visible, girls were beautiful and they were smiling all the four event days. Additional to that, they expanded the interest outside the event by sharing a lot of photos and videos via their instagram channel. Great work!

Jolla communities

This very important 3rd party, sharing information and marketing the new company, was well present at the event and shared knowledge of Jolla to the world. Review Jolla Blog wasn't on site, but several articles and photo & video galleries from each day have been popular. On site reporting has been shared at least by Jolla Users, Jolla Es & AllBoutN9 Thanks for your great work!

What to learn

Jolla is a new company sailing towards bigger harbours with a rather small boat. There could have been even more shouting on Twitter, blogs and forums to wake the interest of the popular newspapers and mobile phone sites. There could have been more official press releases and community informing during the event. Jolla could also have encouraged their supporters for even more sharing with some campaigns. The event itsels was organized almost perfectly, but as the company strategy seems to be marketing mostly via communities, workers and individual happy customers, Jolla can never thank these parties too much for what they are doing.

Mobile World Congress 2015

Are we seeing Jolla again? They were present 2013 with a congress room, 2014 with a bigger booth, and looking at the feedback, I'm pretty sure we will. The event will again take place at Fira Barcelona at Friday 27 February to Sunday 01 March 2015 (yet to be confirmed).